Elliott Erwitt’s sequences reveal the afterlife of photographs, in cinematic jump cuts that show people or animals kinetically recovering from the poses that the camera inflicts on them. Once a tragedy ends, the human comedy is bound to resume.

Tragedy here relaxes into comedy but if you go on watching for long enough the comedy will inevitably be tripped up by another disaster or disappointment. The man on the Mexican beach fuels his sexual courage with beer and propels himself towards consummation in the gap between the second and third frames. He ends in an anticlimax: since the woman has rolled over to evade him, did he succeed only in slumping flat on the sand in a woozy stupor? The stumpy uprightness of the empty beer bottle on the table mocks his virility, as do the spent, sloppy waves.